Consolation Prize

Megan Washington is an earnest and forthright interview subject. She’s rugged up beneath a coat, on what she calls a “prest” junket, doing press when she’s meant to be in bed resting up before her final run of single launch dates. Her nail polish is chipped, and as we all now know, thanks to TEDX and the subsequent Australian Story, she speaks with a stutter. It’s unobtrusive, settling on S- and T-words: two, times, style. She sometimes stumbles through sentences, but they more often than not end with a wry grin or joke, interspersed with vocal work; she puts on voices, adopts personas.

One such persona was the one she took on as a mentor on The Voice for the second time this year.

“I think my eyes were a bit more open this year, I just saw a side of it that I found really surprising because I hadn’t seen it the first year. I think it’s everywhere now. We are so aware of how we are being observed now as individuals. We are so aware of how we look in every picture because we’ve rehearsed it. It’s almost like kids that have grown up with social media being such a prevalent part of their life, it’s almost like they speak in sound bites now. It was really interesting, everybody who was on the show kind of talked like they were on TV… People are just like cyborg, amazing media babies, they just have media in them.

“It’s just so fun, it’s just like a big game of pretendsies, it’s like acting, just pretend, it’s like doing a gig, like the role of the singer, the role of the mentor, that was my role on the show, I was the mentor. I was like ‘Here’s Joel, he’s the boss, and I’m the mentor, I’m the sidekick.’ And our outfits matched like figure skaters, like villains in a Disney film. Our outfits were the same, it’s hilarious, it’s so funny, like figure skaters our outfits matched, how can you actually take yourself seriously when you’re wearing a mix-and-match outfit with someone? It’s funny, it’s like Destiny’s Child or something.”

The role of the mentor is one of many that Washington adapts for the sake of her career. But she’s interested in breaking down the “artist-fan relationship” (something she does by being quite candid on social media), because these roles are just that, roles, they’re not who she, or her audience, really are as people.

“With this record I told the truth and I just never have told the truth before. And it’s really addictive. And amazingly relaxing to tell the truth all the time, compulsively… Ever since I started to think about role in that way I found it really absurd that we have them… It’s very crazy to me, like the role of the long-suffering boyfriend, ‘Oh you know, she’s always like this, she’s crazy’ and then the role of the ‘Babe, you know how I said you blahblah…’ That’s not actually real people engaging with each other, you know what I mean? So the idea of myself as an artist in the role of an artist seemed stupid to me, like the idea that I’m somehow other than everybody else by the fact that I write songs and sing them seems kind of stupid… It’s just my work, it’s just what I do.

“I really didn’t expect that TEDX speech to have the impact that it had, but essentially I just wanted to talk about roles, and I have the role of the singer and the role of the human and I have the same issue in both of the roles which is that my speech is weird and I just wanted to talk about it. I think that the fact that people have found it important might have had something to do ironically with the notion of roles, and that I was speaking out, despite the fact that I’m what, a singer? Big fucking deal. It was kind of that, and also the reason that I did that was because I’d just split up with my old manager and it was very exciting and a lot like a break-up and you do weird things after you break up with someone. Like you cut your hair off or move to the country, or for me, I was like ‘I’m going to do this thing: speak,’ so I did.

“I don’t find it taxing at all to be with people. I don’t find it annoying when people ask for photos or for autographs or anything like that because I get it. I’ve got people that I use as templates, or as totems, by which I assign my personal zeitgeist. I’ve got people that I kind of define myself in accordance with, but without actually making a thing out of it and going ‘I don’t believe in artistry’  it’s a stupid thing to do because everybody would just think that I’m a wanker  and talk about when you can just live it and mind your own business. I don’t even think that I have a right to inflict my opinion on anybody who doesn’t want to hear it. I think I do break down the artist-fan relationship or whatever the fuck that is  it’s just be a human and talk to humans.”

There There is, in Washington’s words, about endings, about consolation, in title, intent and contents. It’s the first record she’s written under her new moniker, her full name, and the first made without the aid of producer John Castle. It’s the beginning of a new way of thinking for Washington. 

“One of the biggest things that I’ve realised, and there’s mirrored resonance both in my artistic output and in my personal life, I think that’s what happens when you’re a singer-songwriter, you just write the shit that you’re living, but I’ve discovered a lot about choice, which is not something that I sort of was very fluent in before. Working with Sam [Dixon, producer], he’s a very considered, deliberate person. So lyrically making choices was something that I’d never ever even thought about before, I always just sort of felt the lyrics. Like How To Tame Lions is a song that I just wrote, it means nothing, it wasn’t a choice like ‘I’m going to write a song about this thing.’ It was more ‘I like the sound of these words, they’re sounding good together, I’m throwing stuff at the wall.’ It was very expressionistic, expressive, rather than deliberate. And that expressivity is something that comes very naturally to me, but marrying that with choices, being selective about what you say and what you don’t, how you rhyme, when you rhyme and what for, what the purpose of the rhyme is, and are you leaving space after an important word so that you give the listener time for it to just resonate in their heads subconsciously, like all that shit... So that’s something that I’ve then brought into my real life as well, choosing who to spend time with because I know why I like them, actually acknowledging ‘These are the things that I really enjoy and I really enjoy to give to this person and that I enjoy receiving from this person and this is why I will spend my time with them,’ rather than just going ‘Oh yeah, he rang, I’ll go hang out,’ you know what I mean? And it’s been really edifying and it’s really addictive, it’s really good.”